GREEN / Ecotopia at 30

Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, January 19, 2005

Ernest Callenbach in his own private Ecotopia: his Berkeley garden. (photo by Gregory Dicum)

Ernest Callenbach in his own private Ecotopia: his Berkeley garden. (photo by Gregory Dicum)

GREEN / Ecotopia at 30

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Ernest Callenbach
is the kind of guy -- kindly, wise and playfully dedicated -- who seems to spring from the land itself in Berkeley. "The whole street was American elm," he told me as we walked toward his home at the base of the Berkeley Hills, "but Dutch elm disease killed them." So he got the neighbors together to select new trees, but they rejected everything the city suggested. "We chose red oak," he says, indicating a spindly stick of a sapling poking out of the ground next to the curb. One day, in its ample shade, yet another generation will find a reason to be grateful for Callenbach's iconoclasm.

In 1973, Callenbach was a 44-year-old film critic, a writer and editor working for the University of California. Disgusted by the heedless waste that seemed to be inextricable from the culture around him, Callenbach imagined a place he called Ecotopia -- a land where everything people did was imbued with ecological wisdom, a sustainable civilization. "We weren't doing it right, so I thought it was time to invent a country that does," he told me, "and I realized right away that any people who are smart enough to do that would do a lot of other things differently, too."

Decades before Sim City, Callenbach developed his ecological society by writing descriptions as a visitor might. He shared these fantasies with friends, and one, Jerry Mander, encouraged him to add life to that backdrop with characters and a plot. "I'm not a writer," he recalls telling Mander. "I'm a film critic." But he did it anyway.

The result is Ecotopia, a seminal novel that articulated a vision for modern environmentalism. Heyday Books has just released a 30th anniversary edition of Callenbach's utopian tale.

Superficially, the narrative seems a little farfetched: Northern California, Oregon and Washington have seceded from the United States to form Ecotopia, a nation based on ecological principles. Twenty years after secession, the first visitor from the United States, journalist William Weston -- the reader's alter ego -- journeys into the woolly technohippie culture of this improbable but strangely compelling country and, in the process, finds himself a changed man.

Twenty publishers quickly rejected the book before Callenbach took matters into his own hands and raised money from friends for a small run. The book sold astoundingly well -- more than 23,000 copies -- and quickly qualified as an underground hit. In a few months, it was picked up by Bantam and, as Callenbach says, "put out as an ugly paperback."

Surprising everyone, including Callenbach, who thought of the book as "just a love story with a happy ending," Ecotopia went on to sell nearly a million copies and was translated into nine languages. Its German edition, in particular, was very popular and influenced many of the founders of the German Green Party, now the most successful national Green Party on the planet.

"It's not a beautifully written book," says Callenbach in a tone that suggests he's often heard criticisms on that front. Ecotopia is a plainly wonky novel -- characters make lengthy digressions into the finer points of sewage sludge and cooperative workplaces -- and the flat characterizations and superficial plot are undoubtedly prominent reasons why so many publishers passed on the story.

But the setting resonates. "People can imagine themselves living in Ecotopia; the detail makes it credible," Callenbach says. "Then, as now, people didn't have easy hope, and Ecotopia served as a beacon. In our society, people are afraid there are no alternatives."

Which is why Ecotopia makes such a surprising read today. Plenty of details turned out to be strikingly prescient: social norms and technological innovations that seemed bizarre or impossible in 1975 are now quotidian. Weston marvels as people toss their trash into separate bins for paper, glass and plastic. Bike lanes criss-cross Ecotopia's capital city of San Francisco, where happy gay couples are pillars of society and the very idea of clear-cutting a forest is antisocial and abhorrent. DVD players, cable broadband, solar power, electric cars with component architectures, digitally published zines and tribal trance-dance music complete the very familiar scene.

"In the years after Ecotopia, there was a lot of great optimism," says Callenbach, gazing into his garden at a tall birch tree he planted during that period. "It looked like we'd be able to make great strides."

The strides not taken haunt the book like daydreams that seem just as remote today as they did in 1975: the demise of diesel vehicles, declining population, universal health care, complete equality between genders, the extinction of consumer culture, a 20-hour work week and totally free love.

Callenbach is clearly disappointed by some of these developments, but, as befits a dreamer -- he calls himself a "visionary" with just a hint of irony -- he remains optimistic. "Society has become more competitive and greed oriented," he laments. "The idea that we could all relate, and get along, is now thought of as quaint, yet we all yearn for that kind of thing. Nobody wants to live the way we're living now. This is a lost generation or two -- lost to the capitalist machine -- but I'm confident we can overcome it in the long run."

"I've been really encouraged by the spread of ecological knowledge," he continues, recalling his grandchildren's growing expertise with native plants. "In grade school, they are learning about things that would never have been part of education for my generation, or even my daughter's generation."

His description of their school garden, with its beauty and its diversity, is like something straight out of Ecotopia. This learning is "part of a huge foundation of public understanding of these issues," he continues, with a soft urgency. "People now understand that nature is a web and that you have to take care of the whole web. You can't just throw an oil well into a national park without ecological consequences."

As he speaks, Callenbach's hands rest lightly on his dining room table. He looks at it lovingly: it is a slab of wood -- a huge cookie sliced from an ancient redwood. "It was cut in 1923 near the Oregon border," he tells me, "an unwanted 'tough top' that sat on the forest floor for half a century. It's at least 1,500 years old. I counted." Then he smiles wryly and adds, "It's my favorite physical object."

With that kind of reminder of nature's patience in his daily life, it's no wonder Callenbach remains so brightly positive. "At the deepest levels, the environmental movement is a spiritual movement because it addresses fundamental questions of how we relate to the universe," he says.

"Even mainline churches -- Protestant and Catholic, and even Eastern Orthodox -- have ecology offices, and they are trying to get their flocks interested. So now people are driving to church in their SUVs, but they are feeling embarrassed about it -- and that's a start."

But as someone who has imagined what it might take to develop a truly sustainable future -- an evolutionary break with the present -- Callenbach knows that these are dark days. "The Busheviks are a dangerously radical force," he says, serious but smiling at his turn of phrase. "We're at a very dangerous pass in our national history, and it can seem so overwhelming that there's a tendency to sit on the sidelines. But we can't. We have to keep putting sand in the gears."

After three decades of shoveling sand, with often surprising results, Callenbach is gratified that his little self-published novel has cast such a wide shadow. "I'm amazed that young people still like the book," he says with awe. "I hope it's done some good."

A new 30th anniversary edition of Ecotopia, with a new afterword by Ernest Callenbach, is available from Heyday Books.